Brandon Hayward's Blog

I was going to write an intro, call it a last gasp plea for why I hate writing around a cubicle. But in the end, I wrote the intro to this piece on my beloved MOR Furniture For Less couch at 7 a.m., with a stiff cup of coffee; the follow up came from getting out of the cubicle and just flowing for 10 minutes. Ten minutes--maybe less--where I just got to write outside of the confines of three walls. It's been an alright recipe. One that's cooked up two books.

Here's a post-intro chunk--credit goes to MOR Furniture For Less--from a November trip on the Rooster that will be in next week's Fred Hall Issue. Maybe I'll cut it up and none of it will run. Maybe it'll all go. But either way let us call this Thursday's blog. A post travel days, pre-fishing snippet from the Rooster. (Pics need not apply):

There’s a cooked-to-order omelet under your hands — ham, cheese, easy on the bell pepper and onion — and air conditioning all around in the galley while you chat it up with a couple guys from the last trip and some new recruits. One is a dude named, ah let’s just call him Fields, who makes his bucks in the valley you grew up in.

The three nights have gone by as fast as they can. But now it’s time to fish. Try. Try hard. But you don’t have to tell yourself that as the big, long drifts go down outside Clarion. “Try. You must try for them guys, try,” comes from the bait tank from Andy Cates. You are ready to try all right. There are 100-, 130-, and 150-pound on seven-foot rail rods sitting up the rail way up from your designated number, up above the rest of the gear to the point where you can just jog past the numbers and grab the apparatus that you choose for the job.

It doesn’t even take the end of the first drift to suss out the way this trip is going to work out: big long drifts way outside Clarion—they call it the Buffer Zone—where the short topshot is still going to rein supreme despite the total absence of anchor chain and rope in the water and the definition of scratch fishing.

Yeah, it’s good honest drift fishing, but all the benefits of fishing a short topshot are about to rein supreme.

Hello Clarion. There’s been a lot of thoughts that revolve around thinking about how to fish you this time around …